Posts Tagged ‘Barcelona’

Well for one reason they won in extra time but the strike was clean one. And I was born in Barcelona all those 75 some years ago. I didn’t live there long and have not been there since but I was born in Spain. So here’s a snap from NY Times front page web site:

But the sports news is not all rose this morning for Lance. He had a bad day yesterday and is now sitting 39th in the Tour de France. He had three bad crashes yesterday during the first Alps day. Not his usual form, but he is 39. Now he says he will just “enjoy his last Tour de France”.

Writing a review of the latest Hitchens book, Ian Buruma writes that 1939 was a turning point year. Well it is a fact of history that Hitler chose the turn his game of international blackmail in 1936, 1937 and 1938 into all out war in September, 1939.

What did my father have in mind when he accepted to go to Paris in April 1939 for the Royal Bank of Canada after getting out of Barcelona only months before that in 1938? Did he simply ignore the trend of overt agressiveness being openly shown by Hitler’s Nazi regime? Did he care if that could have any effect on his life and the life of his family?

I’ve read about 1939 in a few history books. All agreed that it was a beautiful spring and summer, especially in Paris. Was that the existential factor that induced him to continue living in Paris even after Hitler’s armies invaded Poland in September 1939?

It’s a fact I remember about my boyhood in Sherbrooke QC during the war years of late 1940 till 1945, that my father rarely missed listening to the BBC news broadcast. Surely he listened to the same news broadcasts in 1939? How could he not feel the menace of attack from the belligerent Nazi armed forces right up to the invasion of Poland and especially as reports from the Eastern Front left little doubt that Hitler’s intentions couldn’t be peaceful since his takeover and elimination of Polish elites was evident, even at that early stage of WW II?

Or was it that my father subscribed to the ideas of the Canadian Prime Minister of that time, McKenzie-King, who met with Hitler in 1937 and felt he was a calm and serious political leader, even though Von Neurath, the German Foreign Minister admitted to King that many Jews had been treated “very roughly” in “cleaning things up” in German cities, like Berlin?

That was less than 12 months before the grim clouds of Spanish fascism morphed into a officer led rebellion against the liberal socialist Republic that had been voted into power in a recent election in the seesaw battle between all the opposing political forces in Spain pre-WW II.

It was a lovely false spring day when we started for the front this morning. Last night, coming in to Barcelona, it had been gray, foggy, dirty and sad, but today it was bright and warm, and pink almond blossoms colored the gray hills and brightened the dusty green rows of olive trees.

Then, outside of Reus, on a straight smooth highway with olive orchards on each side, the chauffeur from the rumble seat shouted, “Planes, planes!” and, rubber screeching, we stopped the car under a tree.

“They’re right over us,” the chauffeur said, and, as this correspondent dove headforward into a ditch, he looked up sideways, watching a monoplane come down and wing over and then evidently decide a single car was not worth turning his eight machine guns loose on.

Hemingway’s clear prose style gives me an indelible picture of the Spain of 1938 when my father was deciding, while enduring the onslaught of daily bombings in Barcelona by Italian aircraft from Majorca, when to leave that beleagured city.

Less then 12 months later he and the rest of our family were in Paris, which was clearly in the way of Hitler’s helter skelter plans to defeat the armies of the European democracies before undertaking the final fatal battle against the USSR.

It’s odd how writings from that time, like Hemingway’s don’t go away, They just keep popping up when and where I least expect. These writing only remind me about my unfinished writing job.

This photo is part of a recently revealed archive of photos of conflict and fraternizing between opposing fighters during the early part of the Spanish Civil war in Barcelona.

I probably l had just gotten out, or was about to get out, of Barcelona by way of a car convoy to Andorra, on the Franco-Spanish border in the High Pyrenees with my mother, siblings and nanny, Pensa Gomez.

It’s amazing how bits and pieces from that time in Spain and Europe that touch ever so slightly on my own living experiences then continue to filter out. It’s only through the ubiquity of information on the Web that I can get this stuff. The Web has helped me put together more of my own story in Barcelona in 1936 and France in 1939-40.

A few weeks ago I was reading a friend’s facebook postings and read about her musings concerning grieving of loss. I wrote a comment mentioning that I regretted that I hadn’t felt more aggrieved when my father, mother and sister’s died. I told her that I had experienced more grief when an older friend had died, although I was never very much closer to him than to my family. He and I were members of a self-administered men’s support group of 7 in Vancouver, BC.

The closest intimacy I had with Richard was to hear his basso snoring whenever we overnighted with the group. He and another member of the group could be said to produce heroic, or barbaric, noises while they slept and others, like me, tried to. Our conscious exchanges in group sessions were controlled by the rule that any one of us shouldn’t break into another’s musings unless we were asked to.

A few times I can remember that Richard’s complaining about the effect that women’s rights seemed to be having on his sense of personal value got my goat but I never said very much. He was from Montreal as I was but our exchanges about that were really very limited. We never got beyond the conversational and that was probably because neither he nor I really wanted to. The simple truth is below skin level we didn’t really sympathize much one with the other.

I remember walking out of VGH the first time I visited with him and a few of the group since he was manifestly on his “death bed”. As I walked out and down the broad stairway I felt a real emotional wrench in my gut and tears began to roll out of my normally cool eyes. And I did think of Richard in his plight, but most of all I thought about my younger sister’s bout with MS. She hadn’t died yet though. Then my mind segued into thoughts about how I had experienced the long distance last few months of my mother’s life; she was in a Sherbrooke QC hospital and I was living in Vancouver.

My sense of grief at that moment of recall was personal and intense for me. I did tell one of the group I felt closest to then about my sense of grief about Richard and my invalided sister. She died a year or so after that hospital visit.

During the last years of her life, when I was in my late fifties and she 90some, our exchanges were mostly about surface subjects. Although one time she did volunteer that she felt she had had a good life. This got me to think back how unhappy she had looked the whole day of the family celebration of her 50th wedding anniversary. I had not had the nerve to ask then why she seemed so unhappy, although she and my father were in good health for their age and should have been enjoying a day with children and grand-children.

I didn’t have to emotional courage to talk with her because I had never tried to before and a day of celebration didn’t seem like the time to step into her emotions of the day.

Last night I spent a little more than an hour with my psychologist friend, Bella (not her real name) to talk about my “displaced child” feelings. Earlier she had suggested in our comment postings on Facebook that she gathered from the story fragments I posted on my blog and on Facebook, that I seemed to fit the “displaced child” profile.

Never had I thought of myself in those terms although I had journaled often about my sense of instant grieving, regret and loss whenever I heard Spanish songs or the “Mon Amour” symphonic piece to mention the triggers that come off the top of my head now. And I realized before meeting with her last night and during our talk, that I had survived displaced child emotions. In truth, I don’t feel caught in that emotional trough anymore.

The focus of our talk was not to dwell on, or for me to wallow, in an emotional recovery of my experiences having to evacuate from Barcelona in July 1936 and from Paris in May and June of 1940 during the Fall of France. Nor was it a time to celebrate my sense of having survived and being better for that experience.

Here are the points that really got my attention thinking about what was said with my psychologist friend:

I have a successful life so far;

She said she found interesting that from what I said I was future oriented and that amazed her from a 74 yr old man and former displaced child;

Considering what she and I said last night I seem to have healthy open-ness to my inner self and I am manifestly intent on improving my emotional health;

Writing for me must become more like tapping into my emotion energy reservoir from my displaced child place;

I want to do business to give my wife as much as I can; and,

I will do business and finish that partly fictional personal and family memoir

Let me consider the above points. They feel and read like a healthy self assessment for me to be in now. The best thing is that I don’t feel stuck in the past but I can draw on the emotional energy I get from looking back and reliving as much as I can of the bad, the good and the survival.

I have lots of time ahead of me to do most of what I would like to get done before I consider leaving this mortal coil! And that I feel like celebrating more than a birthday!

Since my father worked, as a manager of the Royal Bank of Canada, and lived in Barcelona during 2/3rds of the Spanish Civil War, I have often wondered how working and living conditions were there. Of course, it is factually accurate that I was born in Barcelona October 8, 1935.

This morning I googled into an essay by Albert Weisbord and encountered this word picture that seemed quite authentic and credible to me:

The appearance of Barcelona in May 1937 proclaimed unmistakably that the proletariat was now asserting itself. All the important buildings in the center of the city were occupied by workers organizations. The top floors of Hotel Oriente had been taken over by the Syndicalists and on Via Durutti (renamed after a popular Anarchist leader who fell in battle a year ago) the National Confederation of Labor (C.N.T.) made its headquarters in the magnificent building which formerly housed the Chamber of Commerce. Hotel Falcon had been converted into a center for the Workers Party of Marxist Unification (P.O.U.M.), especially for its soldiers on leave from the front. On the exclusive Pasco de Gracias a beautiful building had been taken over by the Unification Socialist Party of Catalonia (P.S.U.C.) and was now the Case Karl Marx. An enormous propaganda sign covered its basement and first floor but when the fighting began in May, at once the sign had been ripped and the machine guns concealed behind it had opened fire on the revolutionary workers who were behind the barricades in the streets.

One startling innovation was the huge picture of Stalin three stories high which stared at one from the facade of the Hotel Colon, the swankiest hotel in Barcelona which had also been requisitioned by the P.S.U.C. It seems the picture had been accompanied by a picture of Lenin of similar size, but Lenin’s picture had fallen down (let those who will look for a hidden symbolism in this incident) and had never been replaced.

Las Remblas and Plaza Catalunya were a riot of color not only with the red flags of the Communists and Socialists and the red and black flags of the Anarcho-Syndicalists, but with other enormous banners and signs placed over the avenue and center of the square. Here in bright pictures and large letters the masses were called upon to fight fascism and to build a new society. The old street names had been replaced to honor Spanish revolutionists or even Russian celebrities who had caught popular fancy (such as Calle Pavlov or Calle Tolstoy).

The sunny calm that in 1932 had pervaded the city’s thoroughfares had given way to a contagious atmosphere of strain. It was civil war now in all its grimness. Many streets were still torn up where the recent barricades had been erected. The barracks of the old guards near the Columbus column were in a state of complete destruction, a reminder of the July days of 1936, with huge shell holes marking the spot where the cannon of Montjuic in the hands of the workers had smashed the resistance of the guards and had forced them to come down from the top of the column where they had placed their machine guns and to surrender.

The straw-sandaled picturesque dancers in the streets, the gay crowds hanging about the sidewalk cafes, all had vanished. Now groups stood tensely to hear the radio reports of casualties from the front and the stern directives for the citizen on how to win the war. At night all lights were out; searchlights played over the city and on every corner placards notified people where to go in case of an air raid or bombardment. Soldiers, home on leave from the front, were everywhere.

But if the old civil guards in the patent leather hats had disappeared to go with Franco, new guards and police, the Asaltos and Carbineros, had been formed by the conservative elements in the government. These bodies were now apolitical and deadly enemies of the old Workers Patrol Control which had been dominated by the trade unions and revolutionary parties. Once again there was appearing the ubiquitous spy and the night raid. Daily, nightly, individuals known to be active members of this or that revolutionary organization would simply disappear never to be seen again.

Even for the moneyed stranger life was not what it used to be. Few hotels could boast of hot water or warm baths. Food was becoming poor in quality even in the pensions and restaurants where meals were restricted to two courses with one small piece of bread per customer. For the rest of the people there were bread and milk lines while olive oil, tobacco, charcoal, soap and medical supplies had become very scarce. In general only simple fare was obtainable consisting of rabbit, muscles, plain cuts of meat and rice, the standbys of the poorer classes. Nevertheless in certain restaurants patronized by the officials and by well-to-do strangers in the know such delicacies as lobster, chicken, ice cream and strawberries might be enjoyed. Evidently Catalonia was still far from having realized the Socialist Commonwealth where all would be treated alike.

Gone were the pleasant diversions which formerly used to ease the stay of the tourists in the city. In the fashionable neighborhood near Tibidabo the buildings had been sequestered as sanitoriums or hospitals for the wounded, homes for refugees or orphaned children and similar institutions of social welfare. The cable cars, deserted, no longer operated. The fountains of Montjuic likewise were silent… who would want to spend money on colored waters when there was dire need for arms and munitions for the front and hundreds of thousands of the best blood of Spain were dying on the field of battle? The fortress of Montjuic was still there (The Anarchists had captured it for a brief moment during the fighting of the May Days) but as for the old prison, the bastille in which so many champions of the people had suffered torments in the old days, the populace of Barcelona had stormed it and released the prisoners.

As for the music halls with their accompanying prostitution, after July, 1936, when the workers had crushed the fascist revolt throughout Catalonia and were on the road to becoming the chief power, there had been a determined effort to stomp out these hotbeds of vice. Many of the pimps were killed and the women liberated. Educational posters were spread throughout the city advising the soldiers that prostitution was the disgrace of the army and the degradation of the women; it was an agency of Franco and must be stamped out. But in the months that had elapsed since then, during which the influence of the workers’ organizations was waning, there had been a general relaxation of discipline and the dance halls were now open once more with their languishing sirens. By June the Syndicalists had been ousted from Hotel Oriente where now a hot abaret flourished.

How far the revolution had emancipated the women of Spain was an intriguing question for all those who had followed the heroic participation of these women in the actual fighting in defence of their country. To what extent had the old semi-harem status of the feminine sex, so strongly rooted in the traditions of the country, actually broken down? It must be confessed that, in spite of the efforts of the progressive forces in Spain, the enlightenment of the women has not proceeded very far. In everyday life the customs of centuries still had their grip on personal relationships.

Women in Spain were still divided into two simple groups, prostitutes and respectable women, the latter consisting of cloistered virgins and fanatically loyal mates. Revolutionary soldiers could be found beating their wives and even so-called professional revolutionists were still ready to kill their life companions if they were caught conversing with other men. It is true that a certain breath of freedom has blown over the women. Its first expression have been rather freakish ones inspired by Hollywood, heads bleached blond and pained faces glaringly incongruous among the natural dark beauties of Spain. Women constituted still but a small percentage of the membership in the revolutionary organizations, and the women secretariats which had been recently appointed were having an exceedingly difficult time of it to make the men understand the need of drawing the women into the movement and the women to understand their place in the new social order.

Similarly with the school system. The Generalidad was making efforts to introduce new methods and curricula, yet in only two or three of the nine high schools of Barcelona had they succeeded to any great extent. Old fashioned methods of drill and an antiquated routine still prevailed in the rest. Attendance of children at school was not strictly enforced, although a great part of the people was still illiterate. Yet one could see that much more reading was being done on the whole by the adult population. In Las Rambles, adjacent to the flower stalls, large numbers of book stalls had now opened up selling revolutionary literature of all sorts. But it must be admitted that among the serious pamphlets and books, “literature” of a quite different sort was common: pornographic novels and magazines that purported to speak of physical culture, of nudism and the emancipation of women but in reality were cheap commercial ventures calculated only to stir up the sexual passions of the “liberated” readers.

Gone was the censorship of the clergy, as were the priests, monks and nuns themselves. The churches were no longer anything but blackened shells, where fire had finished whatever bombs and dynamite had left of their walls. Not a church was left standing intact in Barcelona except the old Cathedral which, singularly enough, had been preserved by all factions as a work of art.

The workers factions were by no means in harmony among themselves, the chief quarrel being between those who wished to retain the present republic while fighting Franco, and those who wanted to pursue the revolution further along the lines of the Russian Revolution of October 1917. These latter groups (The Anarchists, the Syndicalists and the P.O.U.M.) had been mainly responsible for the collectivization of industry which is one of the most fundamental changes that have been effected in Catalonia. Restaurants, means of transportation, as well as all key industries have been thus collectivized.

During the fighting of the July Days of 1936, many owners of industry, shopkeepers and restaurateurs, tired of the perpetual tumult and fearful of their lives should a social revolution be successful, fled the country. To take over the abandoned enterprises and operate them was at once a natural step and a necessity for the continued economic existence of Catalonia. The expropriation was carried out principally by the C.N.T. which in the course of the past year has become the leading industrial corporation as well as the most powerful proletarian group. The change of direction was not effectuated without considerable confusion during the early period of workers’ control.

Oh my goodness! Doesn’t that sound like a place just east of hell on earth. My father’s superiors at the RBofC did urge him to leave Barcelona and he told them that he felt he must stay there to protect the lives and livelihood of his Spanish employees. Yes, this does sound like something my father would do and give as his reason for doing it. A bit sanctimonious, well meaning and taking himself more seriously than he should have, probably.

All during his lifetime he never told me anything about his experiences in Barcelona, not one thing! I inherited some papers from him that said little of fact or feelings.

After sending his wife and children back to Canada in July 1936, he came to get us in the fall of 1937 and brought us back to live in Vernet-l-bains in the French Pyrenees about 80 klicks west of Perpignan, a wonderful Provencal city of the “Cote Emeraude”.